It’s been about two and a half years since Enkitec took delivery of our first Exadata. (I blogged about it here: Weasle Stomping Day) Getting our hands on Exadata was very cool for all of us geeks. A lot has changed since then, but we’re still a bunch of geeks at heart and so this week we indulged our geekdom once again with the delivery of our Big Data Appliance (BDA). In case you haven’t heard about it, Oracle has released an engineered system that is designed to host “Big Data” (which is not my favorite term, but I’ll have to save that for some other time). The Hadoop ecosystem has taken off in the last couple of years and this is Oracle’s initial foray into the arena. The BDA comes loaded with 18 servers, each sporting 36 Terabytes of storage for a whopping total of 648 Terabytes. It also comes with Cloudera’s distribution of Hadoop (and software from various other open source projects that are part of the Hadoop ecosystem). We’re very excited to start working with Cloudera and Oracle in this exciting new approach to managing large data sets. Anyway here’s a few pictures:

The rack’s pretty heavy with all the disk drives. One of the delivery guys said he had a full rack of EMC drives that actually fell through the floor of the office building they delivered it to (no one was hurt). Fortunately we didn’t have any mishaps. And at a couple of thousand pounds, we will not be moving it around to see how it looks next to the coffee table (like we do with slightly less heavy pieces of furniture at home).

Another picture of me and Pete. Not as good as the other one, but I love the shoes!

Tim Fox loves the big power cables.

The BDA also has a handy beer shelf (this is the top secret new feature).

The BDA cabinet has a lock and of course the key’s were in a well label plastic bag. I had Andy Colvin hold up the label so I could take his picture. I called the shot “DoorKeyAndy”. – seemed appropriate ;)

2 Comments

You promised to go into the term “Big Data” at some future time. Here’s my two cents on the use of the term:

In the late 1980s, NCR came out with the Teradata machine. It was a very powerful warehouse machine capable of processing more data than most could imagine at the time, hence the name. 15-20 years later, machines and databases handling terabytes of data were fairly common, so….

In the late 2000s, Oracle releases Exadata, again able to process more data than most have ever dealt with before.

Both shining examples of what is called “Marketing Overstatement” to make a point.

Calling the new wave of machines “Big Data” is merely capitulation – it no longer makes sense to exaggerate or predict how much data these machines may actually be able to process, so there’s no advantage in trying…

[…] Exadata machine into Enkitec’s exalab. Now we have a V2, X2 and X3 there, in addition to ODA, Big Data Appliance (which comes with a beer-holder built in!) and an Exalytics box! So you understand why Karl Arao is […]